Annotated Bibliography
3. Title : Writing for the Web
Author: Jackob Nielson
Website :http://www.useit.com/alertbox/97036.html
Summary
This is a webpage written by Jackob Nielson from Sun Microsystems on the guidelines for writing on the web. He provided a very interesting fact on how the speed of reading from the computer screen is 25% slower than reading from paper. He also commented on how this problem could be resolved in future.
The other point he brought up dealt with the style of reading which the reader adopt. This style of reading is basically scanning text and picking out the key points, and paragraphs of interest, skipping out large chucks of other information. He gave comments on how hyperlinks could be used to split up information, keeping the main body short and succinct.
As readers read at a slower pace on the screen, hypertext structure caters to audience needs by splitting information into multiple nodes, connected by hyperlinks.
Review
As writing on the web is a relatively new phenomena, not much articles was written on this topic in text form. Thus , this is a hard to come by article, as well as a very informative one.
In this article, Nielson highlighted what web writers should be aware of, while targeting audience in this environment.
In his own site, he had practiced what he preached, by having a very short introductory page where further information were connected by hyperlinks. This make his site user friendly, allowing to go straight to the information we want by following the headings of the links.
Of the most interesting links I followed in the article, it brought me to the heading "In Defense of the Print", which supports reading a printed book.
This is of particular interest to me as the article gave justification on the advantages on reading a printed text, in contrast to an on-line text.
